Facebook, Instagram still experiencing issues after ten hours

Facebook has been experiencing a partial outage for more than 10 hours, making for potentially the biggest service interruption in the social media site's history.

The issues have also affected Facebook-operated Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and the Oculus VR platform, as well as Facebook Pages and Facebook for Workplace. Some users have been completely unable to access the services, while others have found them functionally normally or partially working, for example not loading certain pages or posting new updates.

Facebook and Instagram users around the world have been left frustrated this morning.Credit:Bloomberg

On its platform status website, Facebook described the ongoing issues as a "partial outage".

Facebook acknowledged the problems just before 4am AEDT, via Twitter: "We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," it said.

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However more than 10 hours later many users were still having problems, according to the website DownDetector.com.

In that time Facebook issued just one more statement via Twitter, confirming that "the issue is not related to a DDoS attack", meaning it was likely a technical problem not related to outside parties forcing the services offline.

The last time Facebook suffered an outage of this length was in 2008. But as the BBC's Dave Lee pointed out on Twitter the social network only had 150 million users at that time. These days the service is close to ubiquitous, with more than 2 billion users.

As disgruntled users accustomed to staring at Facebook and Instagram shuffled over to Twitter, terms and hashtags related to the outage grew to make up six of the ten highest ranking in Australia.

The Facebook disruption comes a day after Google Drive and Gmail suffered partial outages of their own, leaving some users unable to send emails with attachments and with spotty access to their online files for several hours.